It's Only Sorta Broken...

Before we get all “fix the future”, let’s take a minute to remember Ozzy

My musical veins never really ran with Black Sabbath blood, but Iron Man is a total banger, & Ozzy’s solo Crazy Train is an angry earworm that just won’t quit. And I will argue that The Osbournes - the reality show letting us into Osbourne whackery - was at or near the top of reality TV art.

RIP, Ozzy. You were a singular, chaotic, goofy force in the universe. Godspeed.

Back To Our Regularly Schedule Programming: A Lot of Agencies Are Stuck - And That’s Not ALL Bad

Getting stuck is part of being alive. It just happens. You take your eye off the ball, and suddenly there is no momentum. Or something shifted and the thing that you can rely on doesn’t work the same. It happens. No one, ever, with maybe the exception of David Goggins, has ever made unrelenting progress every day.

Getting stuck is fine. In fact, sometimes it is good. When you get stuck, you get frustrated, and that frustration can fuel changes. Getting stuck can be a gentle reminder that you need to adapt and grow.

Most of the time, though, getting stuck is a symptom of some serious misalignment that you don’t see clearly. The world changed and you didn’t is usually the cause…you didn’t invest in process development and grew so your team is working harder than ever. You didn’t evolve your measurement strategy, so your results aren’t as relevant, and you throw more of the same at it.

Learn how to make AI work for you

AI won’t take your job, but a person using AI might. That’s why 1,000,000+ professionals read The Rundown AI – the free newsletter that keeps you updated on the latest AI news and teaches you how to use it in just 5 minutes a day.

Sign up to start learning.

Stuck & Broken Are Different

I spoke with an agency owner a few weeks ago - an old guy like me - who was sure that his agency was broken. He came to me asking if he thought he could sell his agency for anything worthwhile. He ran me through the numbers…and he did have a small part of his company that was growing more quickly than others - it was around marketing automation and newsletters - all the big dollars in his agency were tied up in programmatic…and over the last few years, he couldn’t get people to pay for programmatic the way they used to…

His agency was declining in revenue, but he needed all his staff to serve existing clients. He had one you guy that was providing some marketing automation and newsletter building to their existing clients. Every month, clients were adding more to that part of his business. But because he didn’t value the impact of those efforts, he was seriously undercharging. And from a marketing perspective, he was valuing mostly cold audiences with programmatic “in market” potential as much more valuable than 1st party, warm audiences.

He isn’t dumb - in fact he was a real visionary in the programmatic space - but never adjusted his thinking as the market shifted. He is still a programmatic genius…but his opportunity for growth was somewhere else.

It Looked Like a Compound Fracture

He was looking at his agency as if it had just been in an horrendous accident, with broken body parts & blood everywhere. It seemed so SUDDEN to him. But in fact, this crash was probably a decade in the making. So the carnage that he saw was gruesome - new, and fresh & urgent.

He was overwhelmed by the sight. It was almost too much for him to look at…in fact, it was too much to look at, which is why he ignored the small daily changes that shrunk his margin.

It wasn’t a horrible crash…in fact it has been a gentle decline, like a balloon with a pinhole leak.

And he didn’t even see the agency that was struggling to grow around the edges of the detritus & debris of what his agency used to be.

Start learning AI in 2025

Keeping up with AI is hard – we get it!

That’s why over 1M professionals read Superhuman AI to stay ahead.

• Get daily AI news, tools, and tutorials

• Learn new AI skills you can use at work in 3 mins a day

• Become 10X more productive

Sign up and start mastering AI

I Held Up the X-rays…It wWas Just a prain

His programmatic business was “fine”. It wasn’t growing. It’s probably not ever going to grow again. It’s margins were a little low…nothing that some adjustments in expenses couldn’t fix in a year.

His “throwaway” offer was strong. Between service fees and platform commissions, if he doubled his newsletter biz, he’d have the most profitable year in the last 5.

He just couldn’t see it because his worldview was fixed…and it was huge impressions and soft intent signals that drove business for clients in his mental model. But his staff had already solved his problem with the 1st party audience play.

His agency wasn’t broken. He just didn’t recognize the cure.

The World Changes A Bit Every Day

The deep pain he was feeling was a gentle evolution - like these changes to the Cape Cod shoreline over 40 years. Nothing dramatic, but with 1% change every day means that the world looks like a different place in a really short period of time.

Stuck is when you haven’t been paying attention for a few months. Broken is when you haven’t been paying attention for years.

Stuck can be a great reminder that change is needed. Broken is when you think the patient is terminal.

Don’t let yourself get broken.

Webinar Alert

On Thursday, July 24, along with my friends at Parallax, with be giving a FREE webinar call REVENUE GROWTH IS BROKEN - Let’s Fix It!

It’s free - there will be ample time for Q&A - and we will be talking about how agency revenue growth has changed and how you can adapt and grow, regardless of what the economy, AI, the competition, or tariffs throw at you.

Something New

I’ve been entrepreneurial my entire life, though I don’t fully embrace myself as an “entrepreneur” until I was in my 30s. My wife found her non-profit entrepreneurial mojo in her 50s.

The game is way different in your 50s and beyond. So she & I have created a newsletter for all the GenXers, Boomers & Xennials that are embarking (or re-embarking) on an entrepreneur’s journey on the senior side of 50.

It’s called chapter neXt. It’s full of 70s & 80s (and maybe some 90s) nostalgia, plus some inspiration & guides to how to put all perspiration into your new (or renewed) biz in order for you to make it a success on your terms

Our sponsorships are ads (obviously - duh). But some of the companies or services linked in our content may pay us a minimal commission if you buy something from them. Potential payment is never a factor in what we link to, and we have direct experience with every company or service where you can buy something that we mention in our content.